Professional Documents
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4
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Although Graetz himself would not have seen it this way, the identity of Judaism as understood by him therefore relied, for deining
itself, upon a concept of mysticism as its rhetorical other. Gershom
Scholems oeuvre, in contrast, can be seen as a successful attempt to
6
See the excellent analysis in Schfer, Adversus cabbalam. For the language of
exclusion, see for instance Graetz, Konstruktion, 5659 (quoted in Schfer, o.c., 190),
where in one short quotation we ind mention of the talmudischen Umzunungen,
the Jewish home as a scharf umgrenztes Palstina, which isolates Judaism within
the situation of the diaspora by drawing unverrckbare Grenzen with the outside
world, and where the Talmudic Beschrnkungen result in a Talmudic Isolierungssystem. Later on in the same text there is mention of the ausscheidende function
of Talmudism, which repels the schdlichen Bestandteile and fremde Einlsse
(Schfer, o.c., 191).
7
Schfer, Adversus cabbalam, 204, quoting Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol.
10, 114.
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integrate back into Judaism what had been excluded from it by the
Wissenschat des Judentums of scholars such as Graetz.
But the identity of Jewish mysticism as conceived of by Scholem
implied a rhetorical other as well. As already suggested by the quotation given above, in his case this was the universalist understanding of kabbalah as a perennial wisdom that was supposed to have
been widely present in many traditions of the ancient world. It is well
known that the origins of that concept are to be found in the Christian
interpretation of kabbalah since Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, leading to what has sometimes been called a metaphorical kabbalah (or
a second kabbalah),8 the permutations of which can be traced from
the iteenth century to the present. Relecting on that phenomenon,
Scholem wryly observed that as far as the essence of the kabbalah
is concerned, it [could] supposedly be anything except Judaism, and
accordingly, to ind its origins one could look anywhere, as long as it
was as far away from Judaism as possible.9
Just as Graetz had deined the identity of Judaism by emphasizing
its rationality and sharply opposing it to mystical Schwrmerei, Scholem for his part deined Jewish mysticism by emphasizing its Jewishness and sharply opposing it against the idea of a universal kabbalah
with non-Jewish origins. As I hope to demonstrate in this article, in
the nineteenth and indeed until far into the twentieth century such a
concept of kabbalah was by no means limited to esoteric or occultist circles. On the contrary: we will see that, at the time, recognized
scholars of kabbalah, such as the French pioneer in this ield Adolphe
Franck, held very basic assumptions in common with occultists like
Eliphas Lvi or Papus. Across the boardfrom popular esotericism to
the academic establishmentwe encounter during this period the idea
of a universal kabbalah with non-Jewish roots, and it is against this
widespread consensus that Scholem developed his work.10
8
Kilcher, Sprachtheorie der Kabbala, 2122, and for the concept of a second kabbalah see his reference to Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins heorie, 199.
9
Scholem, Die Erforschung der Kabbala, 256: Was dem heutigen Beobachter
solcher Aufassungen im Rckblick aufllt, ist, dass in den meisten dieser Deutungen die Kabbala ihrem Wesen nach alles andere eher sein soll als gerade Judentum
und ihr Ursprung dementsprechend auch mglichst weit weg vom Judentum gesucht
wurde.
10
From the discussion in Dan, Gershom Scholem, one may conclude that to a
greater extent than oten assumed, even Scholem himself was still inluenced by such
concepts in the irst decades of his career.
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2. Adolphe Franck
Moshe Idel noted in 1988 that Adolphe Franck, with his monograph
La Kabbale ou la philosophie religieuse des Hbreux of 1843, contributed more to the knowledge of Kabbalah in modern Europe than did
any other work prior to the studies of Scholem;11 and Paul Fenton
has called it a milestone in the annals of Qabbalistic research, which
had the efect of a bombshell [and] gave an unprecedented impetus to Qabbalistic studies.12 he book was translated into German
almost immediately, by Adolf Jellinek, and went through three editions in France; it was translated into Hebrew in 1909 and into English
in 1926.
Adolphe Franck was born in Liocourt in 1809. He originally studied
for the rabbinate, but changed his direction in favor of philosophy.
Having moved to Paris, he became a protg of the famous philosopher of eclecticism Victor Cousin, and embarked on a brilliantly successful academic career. He has been described by Charles Mopsik as
a model of integration:13 the irst French Jew to receive an agrgation
in philosophy, his book on kabbalah was called a masterwork of criticism by Jules Michelet and earned him his prestigious election, at the
young age of 36, to the Acadmie des Sciences Morales et Politiques,
one of the ive academies of the Institut de France. His career found
its culmination in a professorship for Droit de la nature et des gens
at the Collge de France, from 1854 to 1881. While a typical representative of the French academic establishment, he was also actively
involved in the cause of Judaism, becoming president of the Socit des
Etudes Juives and contributing to the Archives Isralites for over half a
century. He died in 1893 at the age of 48.
In philosophy, Franck is best remembered as editor of a 1800-page
Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques, which appeared from 1844
on. In the line of Victor Cousins eclecticism, he believed that metaphysics had the task of demonstrating the four basic tendencies of
human thoughtnaturalism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticismto
be four aspects of one and the same reality. Franck is known to have
12
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14
15
16
17
18
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What follows is a long list of examples. First, there is the heosophical Society, its highly interesting journal Lotus, and its French
branch Ysis that has recently published a translation of the Sepher
Yetzirah. Franck quotes with apparent approval the statement of the
translatornot mentioned by name, but it is actually Papusthat
19
20
21
Ibid., viii.
Ibid., ix.
Franck, Avant-propos de la deuxime dition, ii.
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the Kabbalah is the unique religion from which all the others have
emanated.22 In another theosophical journal, LAurore, published by
Lady Caithness, kabbalah is described as Semitic theosophy and its
method of esoteric hermeneutic is presented as a possible means of
overcoming the diferences between Buddhism and Christianity.23 In
both cases Franck states that he gives no opinion about the merits of
the argumentation, but his general attitude is quite positive. Franck
then turns towards Papus new journal LInitiation, which has existed
for only four months, and oten associates heosophy with la sainte
Kabbale. He highlights an article by Ren Caill which discusses the
Zohar in the context of a Christian kabbalah along the lines of SaintMartin, the unconscious renovator of the doctrine of Origen.24 And
inally there are the various Swedenborgian journals. Here Franck is
slightly more critical, pointing out (correctly) that kabbalah and Swedenborg have nothing in common except that they both give esoteric
interpretations of Holy Scripture.25
he inal page of Francks new foreword is devoted to a strong
restatement of the ancient origins of both the Zohar and the Sepher
Yetzirah, with reference to some recent publications. He believes that
these origins go back even much farther than argued there:
Is it not true that the numbers and letters that are basic to the entire
system of the Sepher Yetzirah play a very large role in Pythagoreanism
and the earliest systems of India as well? We have this fashion nowadays
of wanting to make everything young, as if it were not true that the
systemic spirit and, most of all, the mystical spirit are as ancient as the
world and destined to endure as long as the human spirit.26
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28
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Ibid., 193194. Franck was harshly criticized for these interpretations later, notably by le chevalier Drach, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism who published a
small but much-noted booklet against Franck in 1864 (Drach, La Cabale des Hbreux
venge; see discussion in Fenton, Qabbalah and Academia, 5253).
32
Franck, La Kabbale, 15, here with reference to Athanasius Kircher: les ides
originales et profondes, les croyances hardies quelle renferme [. . .] sont entirement
perdu[e]s pour sa faible vue, frappe seulement de ces formes symboliques dont
lusage et labus semblent tre dans la nature mme du mysticisme. La kabbale est
pour lui tout entire dans cette grossire enveloppe, dans ses mille combinaisons des
lettres et des nombres, dans ses chifres arbitraires, enin dans tous les procds plus
ou moins bizarres au moyen desquels, forant les textes sacrs leur prter leur appui,
elle trouvait un accs dans des esprits rebelles toute autre autorit qu celle de la
Bible. Les faits et les textes que jai rassembls dans ce travail se chargeront de dtruire
ce point de vue trange et me dispensent de my arrter plus longtemps.
33
Ibid., 73.
31
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value of the kabbalah for Franck is not its speciic Jewish manifestation, but it universal essence, which happens to coincide with the
idealist metaphysics to which he himself adheres.
3. Eliphas Lvi
As far as I have been able to ascertain, the founder of occultist kabbalah Eliphas Lvi does not refer even one single time to Francks
famous book on kabbalah, which had appeared about ten years before
he started publishing his own works on occultism. Given Lvis fascination with la sainte Cabale, it is hard to imagine that he did not
know of it; but if he did, any direct inluence will be very diicult to
demonstrate. If we approach Franck and Lvi as parallel but independent authors, a comparison is all the more interesting, since the significant resonances between their ideas suggest a common background
that was not limited to esoteric milieus.
Eliphas Lvi Zahed is the pseudonym adopted (in his later occultist
writings) by Alphonse-Louis Constant, who was born in a very poor
family in Paris in 1810, and is therefore an almost exact contemporary
of Adolphe Franck. He attended seminary to study for the priesthood,
but never made it to the ordination due to a series of events and conlicts that have been described in detail by his biographers38 but do not
need to detain us here. Suice it to say that during the irst part of his
life, Constant maintained a highly complex relation with the Church,
while at the same time getting involved in various movements working for social and political reform: his socialist and utopian writings,
including high-minded ideals about the emancipation of woman, led
to conlicts with the authorities and several prison sentences. It was
in the wake of the revolution of 1848 that he made his decisive move
towards the study of esotericism. he three central works documenting his occultist worldview were published in 18541856, 1860 and
1861 respectively, and made his name as an authority of magic and
kabbalah.39
essence develops out of the narrow and limiting constraints of nationalistic or religious commitments.
38
Most complete in this regard is Chacornac, Eliphas Lvi. Another good monographic treatment is McIntosh, Eliphas Lvi. Of rather doubtful quality are Uzzel,
Eliphas Lvi, and Williams, Eliphas Lvi.
39
Apparently he came to be seen as an authority even outside occultist circles, as
suggested by the fact that he was asked to contribute articles on kabbalah and Knorr
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von Rosenroth to a reference work as famous as the Larousse (see Kilcher, Verhllung
und Enthllung, 354355).
40
Scholem, Major Trends, 2.
41
Secret, Eliphas Lvi et la Kabbale, 83.
42
For example, on page 83 rus should be subtil; on page 85, n. 3, the page
reference should be 364378, not 346378; most of the quotations are not referenced;
the article is full of sentences that are incomplete, grammatically impossible, or completely obscure; and inally Secret blames Lvi for quoting a non-existing book, which
however does exist and was quoted correctly by Lvi (Mosheim, Observationes sacrae
et historico-criticae, 1721; see Secret, Eliphas Lvi et la Kabbale, 86).
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dominate the astral light by the disciplined will. Likewise, I will not go
into Lvis highly ambivalent speculations about Satan and the nature
of evil: one of his main preoccupations, to which he has devoted some
of the most inspired pages in his oeuvre.43
What, then, does Lvi understand by kabbalah? In the introduction
to his Dogme et Rituel de la haute magie, we ind the following passage, which contains all its essential elements and also gives us a taste
of Lvis Romantic prose:
One is seized by admiration, when penetrating into the sanctuary of the
kabbalah, and at the sight of a dogma so logical, so simple and at the
same time so absolute. he necessary union of ideas and signs; the consecration of the most fundamental realities by elementary characters; the
trinity of words, letters and numbers; a philosophy that is simple as the
alphabet, profound and ininite as the Word; theorems more complete
and luminous than those of Pythagoras; a theology that one summarizes
by counting on ones ingers; an ininite that one can hold in the palm of
an infants hand; ten numbers and twenty-two letters, a triangle, a square
and a circle: those are all the elements of the kabbalah. hey are the
elementary principles of the written Word, the relection of that Word
that has created the world.
All truly dogmatic religions have their origin in the kabbalah and
return to it; all that is scientiic and grandiose in the religious dreams
of all the illumins, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin etc., is
derived from the Kabbalah; all the masonic associations owe their secrets
and their symbols to it. Only the kabbalah consecrates the alliance of
the universal reason with the divine Word; by the counter-point of two
apparently opposed forces, it establishes the eternal balance of being; it
alone reconciles reason with faith, power with liberty, science with mystery: it has the keys of the present, the past and the future!44
For Lvi, the very value and interest of the kabbalah resides precisely
in its universality, by dint of which it can function as the key that
unlocks the secrets of all religions and philosophies: if the kabbalah
were a speciically Jewish phenomenon, it might have been an object
of historical curiosity, but could not possibly have commanded the
enormous authority it has for our author. And this authority, in turn,
is grounded in a metaphysical concept: the kabbalah is the direct
relection of the Word: the Logos that has created the world accord43
A particularly good example is the Introduction to his Rituel (Dogme et rituel,
159171; all page references will be to Lvi, Secrets de la magie, edited by Francis Lacassin, which contains Lvis three main magical texts in one volume).
44
Lvi, Dogme et rituel, 47.
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45
Ibid., 58.
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46
In this regard, the underlying logic of Lvis concept of correspondences is quite
similar to Swedenborgs; see in that regard Hanegraaf, Swedenborg, Oetinger, Kant,
311.
47
Lvi, Histoire, 358 (nous soumettons notre uvre tout entire au jugement
suprme de lEglise); 421 (Nous ne dogmatisons pas, nous soumettons aux autorits lgitimes nos observations et nos tudes); 481 (Nous ne prtendons ici nier ni
airmer la tradition de la chute des anges, nous en rapportant comme toujours en
matire de foi aux dcisions suprmes et infaillibles de la sainte Eglise catholique,
apostolique et romaine).
48
Waite, Preface to the Second Edition; idem, Preface to the English Translation.
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49
50
51
52
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those teachings with him and this is how they entered Jewish culture.
he doctrine also spread to Egypt, where it was translated into the
hieroglyphic language of images and symbols, leading to an elaborate
science of correspondences between gods, letters, ideas, numbers and
signs; and just as Abraham had saved the doctrine before it began to
degenerate in Chaldaea, Moses did the same for Egypt. his is how the
kabbalah became the hidden doctrine of the Hebrew Bible.
And then everything changed. [A] breath of charity descended from
the sky,53 Lvi writes, with the birth of Christ. From that moment on,
the magic of the ancient world became obsolete: a sad beauty spread
over its dead remains [. . .] a cold beauty without life.54 And as for Judaism: just like Rachel died at the birth of her youngest son Benjamin,
the birth of Jesus as the youngest son of Israel meant the death of his
mother:55 henceforth Christianity became the legitimate carrier of the
true kabbalah, and its survivals outside the Church lack such legitimacy.
his is why the rest of Lvis history of magic turns out to be essentially
a history of heresies: the teachings of the false Zoroaster lived on in
such currents as gnosticism and the Order of the Knights Templar, in
witchcrat and black sorcery, and in various kinds of ecstatic cults up
to and including the contemporary current of spiritualism.
Although Roman Catholicism has been the legitimate carrier of
kabbalah and true magic since its very origins, this great truth still
remains hidden even to its adherents: Considered as the perfect, realized and living expression of kabbalah, that is to say, of the ancient
tradition, Christianity is still unknown, and that is why the kabbalistic
and prophetic book of the Apocalypse remains unexplained. Without
the kabbalistic keys, it is perfectly inexplicable, because incomprehensible.56 hese keys are now revealed to the world by Eliphas Lvi. He
claims to ind them in the Zohar and Sepher Yetzirah,57 but given the
universality of the kabbalah, he feels no less free to ind them in a
Ibid., 456.
Ibid., 457.
55
Ibid., 461. See also e.g. Lvi, Clef, 866: Ainsi, toutes les absurdits apparentes
des dogmes cachent les hautes et antiques rvlations de la sagesse de tous le sicles,
et cest pour cela que le christianisme, enrichi de tant de dpouilles opimes, a prvalu
sur le judasme dessch et appauvri, qui ne comprenait plus mme les allgories de
son arche et de son chandelier dor.
56
Ibid. 458. Cf. Lvi, Clef, 865: Le dogme catholique est sorti tout entier de la kabbale, mais sous combien de voiles et avec quelles tranges modiications!
57
On Lvis reception, by means of the Kabbala Denudata, of the Zohar in general and the Sifra di-Dzeniuta in particular, see Kilcher, Verhllung und Enthllung,
353362. Kilcher also shows how Lvi lay the foundations for the subsequent career of
53
54
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other than the hermetic Book of hoth, better known as the Tarot? Lvi
overlooked the fact that the picture was in fact a later addition by the
editor, Abraham von Franckenberg;59 but one suspects that even had he
known this, it would not have caused him to change his mind.
4. Conclusion
Having taken a closer look at Adolphe Franck and Eliphas Lvi, one
must conclude that the essential vision of kabbalah found in the writings of these two nineteenth-century pioneers are remarkably similar
in many respects. Essential to their approach is that they both believe
in a universal kabbalah with non-Jewish origins, and remarkably,
they both trace those origins to the religion of Zoroaster. he similarity is perhaps even more interesting given the fact that they do so for
diferent reasons: for Franck, Zoroastrianism means the Zend Avesta,
whereas for Lvi it means the Chaldaean Oracles. In line with this,
probably the most important diference between the two authors is
that Franck sees kabbalah entirely as mysticism and never discusses
magic; Lvi, on the other hand, sees kabbalah and magic as inseparable,
while describing mysticism in wholly negative terms. his diference is
linked to the fact that Franck sees kabbalah essentially as philosophy,
whereas Lvi sees it as a science of correspondences grounded in the
symbolism of numbers.
hese diferences are signiicant, and one should certainly not overemphasize the resonances between our two authors. Nevertheless, it
remains that Franck the academic and Lvi the occultist present two
variations on the same basic thesis of a universal kabbalah with nonJewish origins: the very thesis, that is, against which Gershom Scholem posited the identity of kabbalah as speciically Jewish mysticism or
esotericism. In the wake of Scholems oeuvre, Francks approach can
nowadays be seen only as a dead end. Lvis work, in contrast, laid the
foundation for a new religious current that is still alive and well today.
he countless misunderstandings of kabbalah that bedevil his writings
from a perspective of critical scholarship have turned out to be highly
constructive ones from the perspective of the history of religion. In
this sense, Scholem was both right and wrong.
59
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